Words & Photos by: Brian Jules Campued
As part of the International Women’s Month, let’s get to know the art show that tackled a sensitive topic and made possible by a female artist.
Photos do tell a thousand words and convey vivid narratives. While painting is proven to be an effective medium to express an artist’s mental struggles, photographs can also communicate compelling stories, portray the real world, and evoke powerful emotions.
Shari Eunice San Pablo broke the deafening silence surrounding mental health through the use of photography in her exhibit: “Inconvenient Silence” which was exhibited last year at the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) Gallery, Intramuros, Manila.
San Pablo’s works shone a spotlight on the different mental illnesses using portraits of a woman and charcoal pencil-written texts on walls which aimed to open discussions about the social stigma and social inequality on mental health.
The inspiration for this exhibit came to San Pablo’s mind years ago when his friend was diagnosed with persistent depressive disorder and social anxiety disorder. She decided that she wanted to be a mental health advocate after understanding and learning things about mental health. “I realized that as a friend, I have certain responsibilities. With that said, I did my research about his illnesses,” she narrated.
It took San Pablo two years to execute the creative project as part of her degree in Multimedia Studies at the University of the Philippines – Open University—from getting her thesis topic approved and researching about the topic and doing the production to successfully securing an exhibition date at the NCCA Gallery. “It was a long process because I had little knowledge about mental health. I had to comb through articles, documentaries, and journals to know each illness.”
In San Pablo’s Inconvenient Silence, silence wasn’t about having the peace of mind or calm surroundings. Instead, it referred to the neglect of people to issues concerning mental health. Through the exhibit, she aimed to shatter this stigma in order to raise awareness on different psychological afflictions affecting a huge number of people.
Depicting several struggles of mentally ill people, the show was more than just pictures and words hanged and written on walls—it told what these people with mental illnesses experience in their lives regardless of different factors. San Pablo emphasized that “social class, age, gender, religion, or race should not invalidate someone’s mental state.”
Some of the photos displayed in the exhibit are about Schizophrenia, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Panic Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, Claustrophobia, Agoraphobia, Kleptomania, Bipolar Disorder, Bulimia Nervosa, and Anorexia Nervosa.
Since photography is the artist’s forte, she then used it as the medium for her works in the exhibit to convey the message she wants the people to get. “There are techniques in photography that I can’t do had I used traditional painting as my medium,” she stressed.
The gallery walls were also allowed to become a freedom wall where the visitors can write their thoughts, share their struggles, or cheer up other people—to let them know their stories and that they’re like everyone else who struggles in life.
San Pablo hoped that the stigma surrounding mental health will be gone. “Hope is a powerful thing. I hope that someday, this silence won’t be as deafening as it is right now. It should be bearable, to say the least,” she concluded.
Amid the roaring thunderclouds in our heads, Inconvenient Silence provided the people the space to understand what others are going through even if they can’t peek into their minds. People who visited the gallery have listened to others who shave spoken on walls and have shared pieces of themselves to others. As they did so, the stereotyping about mental illnesses was broken and the future where mental health resilience is firmly built will surely exist. It all started there.
Young ECHO 
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